Revised from the original on May 19, 2023
Marcelo knew the truth. At the end of the day, the military didn’t give two shits where any of them landed. In the words of one Joe: You can go to Mars for all we care. You just need to get up out of here.
Marcelo balled up the five day eviction notice and tossed it at Joe’s chest. ¡Lo cabrónes! He spent the past year here in a cramped motel room with his crew, Lionel and Puño. Moss View—at least according to the state’s playbook—was the East Haven Climate Refugee Center. That is, until next week when they had to find a new place to call home.
Insurance companies had been jerking Marcelo around for months, refusing to pay for the needed repairs to their home after El Niño. It was all so confusing to him. Home value is factored into rebuilding grants, they said. We can’t cover wind damage, they said. Marcelo had been holed up in Room 12 all morning talking to his dead wife Palacio about next steps. We can fix it up just like new, he said.
It was after 2 by the time Marcelo found his way outside. His crew was sitting at one of the twelve-foot tables set up in the parking lot and waved him over. They were shoveling mouthfuls of peas and rice in their face. Brown fists curled round white plastic forks. He put his tray down and settled in beside them. By next week, I won’t have to see none of your ugly mugs again, Marcelo said.
Lionel laughed and spit peas. My wrinkled behind either, Hulk.
So when’s D Day? Marcelo asked for the 20th time in so many weeks.
Puño picked something stuck between his teeth. Thursday they saying.
Aqui me quedo. I’m not leaving my Palacio.
Lionel and Puño exchanged a look. There was a time when they used to gently remind him that his wife was gone. But not today. Okay, Hulk. We hear you. They said nothing more.
Marcelo earned the nickname within weeks of arriving at the motel with the other so-called climate refugees. He had flipped over the dessert tray one of the attendants had been holding for the entire table. Started yelling at the staff, tossing small frozen cups of lemon-flavored ice to the ground and stomping them. As security dragged him away from the makeshift dining area, he pleaded with them to help him find Palacio and his old piragua cart near the beach so he could show them all. If not for Puño stepping in, the guards would have brought him to the isolation area instead of the infirmary. Two weeks later, the diagnosis of dementia had shaken him. The Hulk nickname stuck, but Marcelo, already in his mid-seventies, had started to shrink to nothing overnight.
Run north if you want, Marcelo said. Follow Musk to Mars. I’m going home. Marcelo and Palacio got their home in ‘95 after living in a cramped one bedroom apartment on Saltonstall Avenue for two years. It was a fixer upper. The last house on a dead-end street next to Lighthouse Beach. Palacio had wanted to be near the shore because it reminded her of her childhood in Punta Santiago. They were the only Puerto Rican family on Caya Drive. Outsiders in the community with neither chick nor child.
The next morning, Marcelo prepared to board the #3 bus headed to Lighthouse Point. In a brown paper bag he packed the notebook Puño insisted he take which included his full name and residence written on the first page in black marker: Marcelo Robles, care of the East Haven Climate Refugee Center. Puño also insisted that he bring three bottles of water. With this heat wave and your age, Papa. You’d be silly to head out without it.
Marcelo frowned at the three plastic water bottles sitting on his bunk bed. Nah, Puño. Palacio told me this morning that microplastics were found in human breast milk. Bet that mierdas in my brain too. Marcelo sighed. There was a time when he dismissed Palacio’s rants about plastics in the sea and entangled whales in the sea. Mujer—callate. Enough already, he said as he waved her away and turned the volume up on the television.
Puño, you have babies. It’s in the breast milk.
Puño had three young children, but tried to laugh it off. Mira Mami, give me a side of plastic with that nipple.
Marcelo shook his head, but couldn’t help but smile. Puño had grown on him this past year. He was hard-headed, but loyal. Always saved Marcelo a seat for meals and stole copies of the East Haven Courier for Lionel from front lawns during his early-morning runs. Fast as hell, Puño had been a medal-winning track star in high school. Those sneakered feet had run from the law twenty years later when he got involved with stealing catalytic converters. At thirty-eight, he was trying to do better. Even talked about getting back with his wife. You can fix this, Marcelo said.
An hour later, Marcelo spoke to Palacio on the bus as if she were seated right beside him rolling sea glass in her palm. Sin ti, no me voy, he said again and again, more agitated each time. She very calmly reminded him that he had already left her, many years ago. ¿Por la blanca? she said. After how our neighbors on Caya Drive had treated us? The young woman sitting across from Marcelo gave him the side-eye and took a seat behind the driver. He watched the woman as she moved a strand of hair behind her ear. Palacio had styled her own hair the same way, he remembered. A tight chignon with tendrils falling down her neck. He thought of what she’d become towards the end, rail thin and swimming in one of his tee-shirts with his old engine and ladder number on it. Her head as smooth as the turquoise sea glass in her palm.
Outside the bus window, slogans were stapled almost everywhere, on telephone poles and tree bark. It was as if those awful words had meant to follow him to his favorite place along the shore. RESETTLE WELL. RESETTLE NOW. Marcelo looked to a plastered poster to his right and to his left. The climate people had tacked them all over town. Marcelo scoffed out loud. Resettle? ¡Qué va! He had lived with his wife Palacio in Morgan Point for over thirty years, though they were separated for two.
He got a full view of the lighthouse when the bus rounded South End Road an hour later. He stood and yanked the stop cord, pulling his brown paper bag off the empty seat. He exited out the back doors. Standing outside, he hardly recognized his old neighborhood. He would have lost his way to the place Palacio’s old vegetable garden used to be if not for the abandoned carousel house in the distance. As for their house, it was on its knees. The old porch steps in sun-bleached piles. His Palacio once sat on those steps with an oversized Puerto Rican flag on her lap. It was the day they’d made him lieutenant. Hang it in the firehouse, she said. You’ve earned it. Marcelo had joined Station 12 in the fall of 1980 after Julio Lozada died. His mom had been crying out in Spanish to white bomberos that he’d been trapped in the garage collapse but they didn’t understand a word she was saying. Marcelo shuffled down the middle of Beach Avenue desperately looking for the flag and his Palacio. The waves of nostalgia he had hoped for gone.
Over a year had passed since the water made a home in their living room and he watched as it quickly rose to his hips. I’ve missed you, he’d told the rising water at first, believing that his Palacio had come back to haunt him. But soon it was at his chest and the rush of cold water from the storm surge lifted the only photo of Palacio from her childhood—a buck-toothed, flat-chested girl of eleven in a yellow tube top. Their framed wedding photos and the dining room chairs. The not-so-secret bank account Palacio created in trust for his outside son. All the picture books they read aloud to one another about the green mango hummingbird and water protectors and melting polar ice caps. Then the urn from the mantle bobbed along and he watched helplessly as his wife’s ashes joined the sea water and he was shook. He’d narrowly escaped the surge by climbing the steps to the attic, and crawling through the window. From the rooftop, he sat bewildered as his piragua cart floated away and entered the current of street flotsam. Unrecognizable whale bodies that were once tolerant neighbors snagged on debris over the three days he waited for rescue from his old crew at Station 12. When the firefighters arrived, he half expected to see Sean or Ronan or Aidan, but he didn’t recognize any of them. He told them that his wife Palacio was the one who told him to leave the house and she was the one who saved him. That he couldn’t leave without her.
Marcelo found himself in a cooling center forty-five minutes later, but he wasn’t exactly sure how he ended up there. Still he was grateful for the water and air. In his notebook, a person had written their name and number in cursive writing that looked so much like Palacio’s hand that he was brought to tears. Beneath the number was a message: If you need me, I’ll be around. Marcelo took it as a sign.
The cooling center people dropped him off at the harbor and left him with a business card, an illegible name scribbled on the back. It was late in the afternoon and Marcelo squinted in the high heat. About ten feet ahead, he noticed a tall heap of old debris at the end of a razed street. He thought he could find some relief from the heat in its shade. As he got closer, he saw that it was actually an installation by Simone Slade, a local artist. In the heap, he found a cart lying on its side. It was his piragua cart. The wheels were locked from rust, the fastened ice tray caked in beach sand. He crouched low, pressed his hands into the mud, and thanked it before combing into the knots of dried-out saltgrass. He felt his back spasm as he reached for a piragua bottle, caked in sand. He cleaned the bottle off against his shirt and felt his throat constrict. He remembered how Palacio nagged him for his sentimental ways, so the old man placed the bottle in his brown paper bag and swallowed back his cry.
It was Palacio’s idea for the piragua cart, he had told Lionel and Puño after the Hulk incident at the motel. A way of supplementing their retirement. She strained mango, tamarindo, and maracuya, heating the pulp until the liquid reduced into thick-sugared syrups as he froze vats of spring water in their basement freezer. At first, the lobster-skinned people were suspicious of his wares, until they sank their teeth into his piraguas. He had stolen glances at them and smiled, moved by how quickly they scarfed down the flavored ice, how they opened their wallets for seconds. And for the kids coming off the city bus to the beach, they got the piragua for free. For ten years, they worked, side by side each summer, faithful to the townsfolk and to the many children. Palacio watched from her kitchen window as he wheeled his rattling pushcart beachside. On good days, Marcelo kissed the bride of his youth, titillated by the syrupy remains he tasted on her mouth. On slow days, he sulked, yelling that her latest batch was bitter.
Marcelo paused at the edge of the cement bathhouse and stared at the half-mile stretch of flood walls where the sand once touched the sea. The seagulls had disappeared and shells that had once peppered the road had been raked away. Posted signs announced that the gated pools would closed by 7pm. Marcelo heard screams and shrieks of laughter before two boys cannonballed into the water, then the harsh whistle before the lifeguard on duty admonished them. Marcelo studied the lifeguard perched on his chair. When he retired at 50 from Station 12, he thought about getting work as a lifeguard. But Palacio pushed that idea away as quickly as it came for he had confessed that he met esa blanca at the beach. That she moved to Providence before the actual birth and he’d never held his boy or heard him laugh. Now he made his way to the concession stand. The teenagers behind the counter were confused by the old man’s request for ten empty paper cones and their laughter came easy. We have over twenty flavors of ice cream, one young girl insisted. Eventually they sold the empty paper cones to him for two bucks a piece (¡Carajo!) and he placed them in his brown paper bag and took off, mumbling under this breath.
Marcelo watched young families playing around the splash pads and a lone man in front of a giant misting fan. Then he made his way to the shallow end of the pool. He waited for the life guard to look the other way before grabbing the metal rail and filling his piragua bottle with pool water. He thought of nothing sitting on the ledge of the sandbox, humming as he placed a row of paper cones from his bag into the sand. He scooped sand into each cone, drenched each mound with water, and formed each one into perfect peaks. A confused mother with ash brown hair and blue eyes pulled her son onto her lap, but Marcelo didn’t feel slighted. He only felt joy bubbling up in his belly.
Can’t hear the tide anymore, he said.
The young mother’s eyes softened when Marcelo handed her son the first sand cone. Odd isn’t it? she said as her son squirmed away from her and added the sand cone to his sand castle.
I have a home in Morgan Point, Marcelo said proudly.
Didn’t they knock most of them down?
Not mine.
The young mother nodded once, but said nothing more. She was distracted by her son’s sand castle, now leveled.
A girl no more than five now tugged on his tee-shirt. Mango’s all what’s left, Marcelo said as he doused the girl’s sand cone with the last dregs of water.
When the lifeguard approached, he put an end to their game of pretend. You lifted pool water, didn’t you? His nostrils flared. Outside glass is strictly prohibited!
Marcelo tried putting the piragua bottle away, but the lifeguard yanked it out of his hand. The man lifted his chin towards the concession stand and handed him a citation. Marcelo’s ears heated from embarrassment, but he could feel his anger rising. He crumbled the citation into a ball and threw it at the lifeguard’s chest before he gathered his things to leave.
On the bus ride to the motel, Marcelo thought about getting back his outside glass from the lifeguard. He remembered the sea glass Palacio rolled between her fingers as she stared at the water during that walk together on Lighthouse Beach when she finally admitted that she knew about the boy with eyes like the sea in Punta Santiago. She had found the three letters and photos tucked inside the toe of one of his old Station 12 boots. When they met, Palacio told him that she’d never be able to have children. He was 35 and she was 32. Would it bother you? If we couldn’t? she asked. And he had said no at the time. She’d taken to wearing his old Station 12 tee-shirts after her breast was removed because it seemed honest. We are three, she said. When doctors discovered a second lump, fear of the unknown consumed them both. You’ll beat it, he’d said. But the cancer had spread throughout her lungs and bone and brain.
Before she lost the ability to talk, Palacio pulled him closer to her hospital bed in the living room by tap tapping the sea glass on the side rail. Who will help you? she whispered.
¿Con qué?
Your piragua cart, sángano. With the every day. She had noticed the forgetting. Just the other day he got lost on the way home.
Marcelo kissed her damp forehead. Fixed the bamboo beanie over her ears. Descansa.
You could look for him. There’s still time. And Marcelo said nothing.
Palacio would have pushed him away if she could only lift her arms. Dump my ash in the water when I’m gone, she said.
Marcelo stubbornly refused. He grabbed the collection of sea glass she’d kept in the living room and slammed it against the wall. Some said it was the beginnings of his dementia. Others said it was the grief. At the end, he fed her bits of piragua ice. She’d passed three months before the floods swallowed the life they’d created together.
There was mercy in that.
When he returned to the motel, he found Lionel listening to the news on a small radio about the record-breaking temperatures. Puño putting his clothes in a tall black trash bag.
Where you goin? Marcelo asked.
Lionel butted in. He running home to his Mami.
Marcelo watched Puño throw his balled-up socks at Lionel’s head. “How will I know you’re okay, son?”
Puño grabbed him for a quick embrace and lifted him off the ground. “I’ll be around.” Then he hoisted his belongings over his shoulder and walked out the motel room they had shared for the past year.
Marcelo sat on his bed and reached into his paper bag for his notepad. Under the message from the stranger, he scribbled that he’d handed out mango-flavored piraguas to ten children at the pool and hugged his son for the first time. It was a good day. That evening, before he switched off the small lamp, he reached for the piece of sea glass he’d inherited from Palacio. She had carried it with her to chemo treatments for nine months. Marcelo once joked that she held onto that glass like it was a vintage medicine bottle from Punta Santiago that alone had the power to cure her.
The next morning, Marcelo rose before the sun and called for a cab. He directed the driver towards the cooling center near the harbor. He tipped the driver before he slipped out of the back seat, leaving his notebook behind. There was a sense of relief when he found his piragua bottle discarded in the recycling bin. With all his strength, he threw it against the concession stand’s cement wall, and cursed the lifeguard’s empty chair. He was surprised that the bottle didn’t break. At the lowest flood wall, he flung the piragua bottle over the wall and walked in the direction of home.
He imagined squawking seagulls, where the breaking tides used to be. And Palacio, his Palacio, reaching out for him from the abandoned carousel house. In place of the carousel horses, there was a North Atlantic right whale and her ten calves. Palacio was smiling, wearing the tank top and shorts from their trip to Bar Harbor, Maine twenty years ago. She had found a turquoise piece of sea glass on the beach that week. When they got home, she added it to the bowl they'd kept on the living room coffee table. Marcelo placed the sea glass back in her hand and followed her to one of the calves. There’s still time, he said.
The morning sun beat down on his face and he breathed in the heat. It will take more than thirty years before bits of the piragua bottle, broken down by sand and sea, finally frosts over. Smooth and polished pieces of Palacio and Marcelo.
Thirty years.
Maybe that will be enough.
Contributor Notes
Jessica Galán is a 2019 Art of the Short Story Workshop alum and a 2020 Kweli fellow. “Palacio” is her debut short story. She was born in Camden, New Jersey and raised in New Haven, CT. She teaches Social Studies and English to amazing high school students in Hartford County. She is working on a novel and a collection of short stories.
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